zlacker

>>NaOH+(OP)
I was really swept up in this article and the portrait of Amanda Barrows - what a unique and strong person and this city is incredibly lucky to have her.

Unlike some here, I came away with a deep sense of empathy, and today’s HN snark and frustration bounced off me pretty hard. The public order issues - homelessness in parks, the challenges of shared spaces—have certainly impacted me. But more than that, I struggle with how to translate the state of the world to my boys. I always remind them: every unhoused person was once a little boy or girl. We might be older now, but we’re still kids inside, and nobody dreams of growing up in these circumstances.

What struck me most was the balance of compassion and pragmatism that Amanda brings to her work. It’s easy to be frustrated with the policies and bureaucratic inefficiencies that slow down real solutions - but they are, in some ways, understandable.

The biggest frustration for me is the gap between the mental state of many unhoused individuals and the requirements needed to secure housing. The city surely understands the long-term costs of its policies, and it’s run by highly pragmatic people with limited budgets. But rules are rules, and at some point, top-down accommodations (including medical interventions...) are necessary to bridge this gap.

>>mrlamb+8d
I think it is an understandable reaction. They're a long history of articles like "man saves multiple orphans from the orphan crushing machine" and people go "ahhh that's so sweet" and nobody stops to ask "why do we have an orphan crushing machine and why can't do anything about that?"

I think it's important to do both.

>>sweete+bA
We don't have anything like a machine that causes homelessness though. Homelessness has existed for thousands of years if not all of human existence and we are probably the closest any society has gotten to eradicating it entirely. We are dealing with probably the hard last 10% of a hard problem. It's just not at all as if we have a terrible system that leads to these outcomes. On the contrary, we've built many systems to successfully prevent these outcomes. They're just not perfect

>>aprilt+gK
lol you make it sound like SF is the normal state of things when it’s one of the only places in the developed world with these issues

>>presen+uX
SF is the left wing version of the headline ‘nothing can be done about school shootings, says the only nation where this regularly occurs’.

And while it is a magnet for this kind of problem, San Jose and Los Angeles have similar issues.

Part of the problem being, they’re one of the easiest places to be/exist if you’re homeless. Not that it’s necessarily easy or pleasant, but compared to Chicago, New York City, or some random suburb? You bet.